#  Love Letters (to God) in Palestine 

 





May 29, 2024

 

 

     ![Zehra Iman, side profile, eyes averted gazing downward](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_16_9__480x270/public/rpl/files/zehra_-_headshot.jpeg?h=4d8e62d5&itok=TGeDBvI8) 

 



 

*I am free, a woman in the sky who deserves to fly*

*I am the key of closed doors,*

*I am the peace of the world,*

*I am a miracle*

—Aya Darwish, Aida refugee camp, Palestine

In the summer of 2023, I was invited to teach a class called “Love Letters (to God)” in Palestine during my time as an intern through the Religion, Conflict, and Peace Initiative (RCPI) at Harvard Divinity School. My internship site was [Lajee Center](https://lajee.org/), a community organization in Aida refugee camp that “provides refugee youth and women with cultural, educational, social and developmental opportunities.” I selected Lajee because its organizational values align with [Illuminated Cities](https://www.instagram.com/illuminated_cities/?hl=en), an organization I founded and through which I first taught “Love Letters (to God).” Illuminated Cities (IC) works with local communities impacted by systemic violence because violence is a [life-altering adversity](https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/08/violence-and-trauma-in-childhood-accelerate-puberty/).

[According to a study by the University of California-Berkeley](https://humanrights.berkeley.edu/hrc-in-the-news/2221/), Aida refugee camp is the most tear-gassed place on earth. As I write this, one of the community health workers who took our class was violently [arrested](https://lajee.org/mahmoud-mashayikh-community-health-worker-arrested/) on May 9, 2024 by the Israeli army, referred to by Palestinians as the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). He is one among more than [nine thousand Palestinians](https://www.middleeasteye.net/live-blog/live-blog-update/over-9000-palestinians-detained-across-west-ban-7-october) who have been detained across the West Bank since October 7.

A few years before I came to Harvard, a Palestinian friend invited me to teach “Love Letters (to God)” in Palestine.

“We will benefit from your classes on food, on love, and on the Divine,” she explained.

“But who am I to go there?” I asked her, “How can I teach in a community I’ve never visited before?” I did not feel worthy, I am not even Palestinian.

“But we are asking you,” she responded, “And we will guide you.”

Then, she showed me a photograph that would never leave me: [a woman who decided to plant flowers inside tear gas canisters](https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2013/oct/03/west-bank-garden-teargas-canisters-in-pictures). When I received the opportunity to be in Palestine through RCPI, I decided to go despite my apprehensions. My Palestinian friend was among the first people I consulted.

 ![Community health workers and zehra iman at Lajee Center](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/rpl/files/666c81ac-2a08-4a3d-9c9e-048e04c7ccea.jpg)

 

*Community health workers team and zehra imam at Lajee Center. Photo: Lajee Team*

I created “Love Letters (to God),” a 15-session self-development community writing course, at the onset of COVID-19. The course is designed to facilitate reflective journeys towards understanding love in relationship to ourselves, the communities we are from and serve, our environment, and ultimately, with God. The primary objective of the course was to provide students with multiple schemas and tools for addressing obstacles. These journeys were facilitated through a series of letters and poems that we would write as a community. We had students join us remotely from cities around the world—Kuwait City, Karachi, New York, California, Cairo, Austin, New Delhi, and even a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh.

One of these students was Ariella, who applied and was accepted to Harvard Divinity School after she included this wish as part of her final project when she took “Love Letters (to God).” Upon her acceptance to HDS, she reached out to our entire cohort to express her gratitude, then contacted me privately to convince me to submit an application.

“I am going to make sure you apply,” she said. “Everything you are doing will benefit from you being here.” There was something profoundly special about being guided by one of my students.

A year later, I was an HDS student who spent a semester taking the “Narratives of Belonging and Displacement in Israel/Palestine” course offered through RCPI, which deepened my learning about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. I worried for months at the thought of teaching “Love Letters (to God)” in Palestine. Any loss or hardship I might have experienced paled in comparison to what the community health workers (CHW) team I was interning with had been experiencing for generations. What could a few love letters, even if written directly to God, do? Despite my apprehensions, I knew there was a part of “Love Letters (to God)” that was integral to the health of any community: using our imaginations to dream and hope.

“Love Letters (to God)” offered a space where students were invited to dream in community by writing love letters that contained their deepest wishes, which is not easy to do under a brutal occupation.

For the community health workers team, in addition to writing love letters, “Love Letters (to God)” was an invitation to learn about trauma interventions. Together, we could connect trauma interventions to existing Palestinian cultural and religious traditions, then extend these interventions to their patients.

I invited the community health workers in Palestine to see our work together as an experiment, where they were the experts on their community’s health.

   ![Set of poetry examples](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/rpl/files/lajee_miracle_poems.jpeg?itok=7t1hW49c) 

 

“Some of the interventions might not work,” I told them, “Some of them might. Let’s try them out together and see what’s realistic and helpful.”

One day, I shared the prompt to write a “miracle poem,” a poem in which you speak about yourself as a miracle. I remember the hesitation with which the community health workers team looked at me. Eyes peering, faces confused, one of them finally asked me, “But what do you mean?” Another said, “I don’t know how to write poetry!” I knew how cheesy every single word of the instructions sounded. My heart raced and I was bursting with anxiety. I had previously only taught this course online, and I did not have a screen to protect me.

It was then that [Maya Angelou’s](https://www.cbc.ca/strombo/videos/maya-angelou-tupac-shakur) words came to me: “When was the last time someone told you how important you are?” I recalled her words to Tupac Shakur when they met by chance one day. “Did you know people stood on auction blocks and were bought and sold so that you could stay alive today?” Her wisdom reminded me that, as an educator, I always hoped my students would understand her words not just intellectually but also internalize them physiologically.

Believing that you are a miracle, particularly in a context that prefers to see you dead or departed, means declaring your existence as integral *and* intentional. Believing you are a miracle comes with a sense of importance not rooted in ego or arrogance, but rather held by the certainty of Divine love in the face of violence. But how could I convey all of this in a single moment?

Previously, one of the most poignant miracle poems had come from a student named [Mohammad Ahtaram](https://www.rohingyatographer.org/ahtaram-shin), an alumnus of the class. He joined us from the Rohingya refugee camp, the [largest refugee camp in the world](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/8/25/what-is-life-like-inside-the-worlds-largest-refugee-camp), located in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. I thought that bringing an example from a previous student might be helpful.

“We Rohingya pray for them and closely watch their news,” [Ahtaram wrote to me when I told him I was in Palestine](https://www.thenation.com/article/world/israel-myanmar-apartheid-genocide/). Often, he would ask me for updates and photographs of Palestine. With his permission, I showed the community health workers in Aida camp photographs and videos of his makeshift housing and life in Cox’s Bazar, then shared his miracle poem.

   ![Poem example from student in Rohyinga Camp](/sites/g/files/omnuum8216/files/styles/hwp_1_1__720x720_scale/public/rpl/files/rohingya_camp_poem.jpeg?itok=xFt1xW0R) 

 

What can a few words of poetry do? What can believing in miracles do for those who are the most broken-hearted because they have witnessed the continual desecration of their land and people? How can believing that you, yourself, are a miracle transform the world when the occupation counts on your obliteration? Somehow, knowing that someone else in a refugee camp in another part of the world had dared to write a poem about his own conditions and dreams resonated with the community health workers. When the community health workers began writing and then reciting what they had written, some in Arabic, some in English, their poetry commanded attention.

What is remarkable about the community in Aida, displaced in a refugee camp within their own country, is how they brought me closer to my own home because of their love. This year, I returned to research the “silent genocide” of my community in Pakistan. The team at Lajee Center and I continued to correspond as we [collaboratively reported on what is happening in Aida camp](https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/in-aida-refugee-camp-palestinian-resilience-overcomes-israeli-oppression/), and I continue to support their programming. Together, we are planning a cultural exchange experience for them, as Palestinians, to visit Pakistan.

Something incredible and powerful begins to alchemize when a miracle poem is recited aloud, shared in the context of a community, and placed out into expansive arms of our world. It can bring each of us closer to freedom.

*Learn more about the work of Illuminated Cities here.*

By zehra imam, MTS '24